I recently attended the bat mitzvah of a young family friend, Ella Gottesman DeBode. During the ceremony, she discussed her relationship with a Holocaust survivor with whom she had been “twinned” through the United Jewish Communities of Metrowest New Jersey's "Twin-with-a-Survivor" program, which pairs students with Holocaust survivors, charging them with keeping the older generation’s stories alive by sharing them at their bar or bat mitzvah ceremonies. The bat mitzvah girl described how when she initially practiced her speech before her “twin,” recounting her life, the “twin” was unsatisfied: she had failed to convey the depth of the survivor’s experience, the enormity of the loss, pain and anguish.

From the Exodus to the Holocaust, Jewish history is replete with suffering. The question, raised by our friend at her the bat mitzvah and by rabbis and thinkers of all faiths, is how to interpret and respond to suffering in the light of faith and covenant with G-d. Our friend spoke of heroic acts of selflessness undertaken during Holocaust. Rabbi Gershon Weiss describes how the Exodus from Egypt not only freed the Israelites from bondage, but served as a catalyst for redemption, inspiring them to become aware of G-d’s presence and to learn to serve and rely upon G-d.

Last month in jail, the women and I examined the Exodus narrative. We read preserved American slave narratives, which showed the slaves understood themselves to be like the ancient Israelites, bound to the slavery of Pharaoh. They prayed for their own exodus.

In jail, we sought to understand how opiate addiction is also a form of slavery, from which we must seek freedom through the transformative power of faith.

Faith requires us not to acquiesce to the all-too-human instinct to abandon G-d in difficult times. Indeed, that is when we should most rely upon G-d. Evil and human suffering is always present in this world, yet, love and life are far more powerful. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel said, “Sin is the refusal of humanity to become who we are.” The tension lies between our insistence on constructing a tribal G-d made in our own image, which vanquishes our enemies and hates as we hate, or experiencing a transcendent G-d, whose glory is Creation, as the Greeks understood kenosis – God’s emptying himself into the world.

Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel tells the story of how rabbis in Auschwitz placed G-d on trial for breaking His covenant with the Jewsih people. Upon finding Him guilty, the adjudicating rabbi observed the sun setting and commenced evening prayer. As Wiesel wrote, “Man can live with a cruel G-d, who creates men to murder them, who chooses a people to have them slain on a sacrificial altar, but he cannot live in a world without G-d. Better to be insane, better to blaspheme, than to be without G-d.”

My bat mitzvah star believes it is not G-d who is cruel, but humanity; that it is our choice whether to respond in kind to cruelty and suffering, or with compassionate justice. In sharing her “twin’s” story with us and acknowledging her difficulty in grasping the scope of the survivor’s suffering, our friend’s voice faltered in tears, touching each of us with the survivor’s anguish.

Becoming more fully present to the suffering of others, becoming more fully human, enables us to move toward the godly, to the answer of G-d of which our lives are the question.